The questions raised by the process of ‘becoming an adult’ give rise to a specific crisis and are part of a process that can be described as post-adolescent. This crisis can be an opportunity to deconstruct – not destroy – certain elements that have contributed to psychic construction. Some defenses, such as the idealization of the object, mask certain alienating identifications that reveal fixations on primary objects. The beginning of an analytic treatment illustrates how this psychic reorganization can begin to take shape within the transference-countertransference framework.